Page 67 of Ringer
And she had nothing but death to look forward to.
She sat back on her heels, waiting for the rise and fall of the room to go still. Her face was wet. She was crying. A green toothbrush with its bristles splayed, tweezers, a scattering of clipped hair, an empty tissue box gathering dust, a straw basket piled with magazines and paperback books. She wanted things. She wanted a phone, an apartment full of books, tall glasses and ice cube trays and mugs fortea hanging from nails beneath the kitchen cabinets. She wanted a space she could fill and fill with her belongings, until no one could touch her, no one could even reach her past all of her beautiful things.
She took a paperback from the basket and opened to inhale its pages. She tore off a piece of paper, and then another, and fed the pieces one by one into her mouth until she felt well enough to stand.
She hadn’t brought her backpack to the bathroom and that was a mistake. But she tucked the paperback into her waistband and found her T-shirt concealed it perfectly. She washed her mouth out. She felt better, with those pieces of paper pulsing their small words out from somewhere deep in her chest.
Hers.
Caelum and Sebastian had moved into the kitchen.
“I should have known the whole demonstration would be a disaster,” Sebastian was saying. Without his glasses, he was beautiful—not as beautiful as Caelum, but still beautiful. He had dark skin, high cheekbones, and eyes the same color as the afternoon sunlight on the wood floor. “But people never listen to reason. They don’t care about facts. They read one think piece in theTimesand they get hysterical about everything. I swear, you can’t even fart on this campus without someone screaming environmental policy at you nowadays. You want somewater or something? Beer? I have wine but it’s old.”
“Water’s fine,” Lyra and Caelum said, at the same time.
“I’m not a conservative,” Sebastian said. He poured water from the tap into tall glasses, and Lyra marveled at how comfortable he was touching everything, as if the whole space was just an extension of his body. “I understand we shouldn’t have theaters named after Ponzi scheme billionaires, or slave owners—and in our country, that excludes more people than you’d think. But Richard Haven?”
He shook his head. “His work on stem cell regeneration was pioneering. Do you know he built a lab in his room when he was in elementary school? He isolated his first nucleus when he wasnine, using a kitchen spatula, basically. I’m exaggerating, but you get the point. He was a genius. You think Steve Jobs made people feel warm and fuzzy? Benjamin Franklin was a total prick, and so was Edison. Heboughtthe idea for the lightbulb, by the way. He was basically just the licensor.”
He paused to take a breath and Lyra too felt breathless: so many words, ideas, names she’d never heard.
And she realized, then, that that was what being raised at Haven truly meant, and why she would never be entirely human. It wasn’t that they’d inserted needles to draw bone marrow or fed her a diet of pills, that they’d called her “it,” that she had never been held or cuddled,that her head had been shaved to keep out lice, and small fatal disease cells had been introduced into her muscle tissue just to watch what would happen. She’d been completely torn away from the human timeline, from a vast history of events, achievements, and names spanning more years than she could think of.
She had no context. She was a word on a blank page. There was no way to read meaning into it. No wonder she felt so alone.
“Actually, that was one of the reasons I was hoping that Dr. Saperstein would show up today—other than taking a stand, I mean. I’m interested in medical tech, and I’m curious about the IP aspect. They’re saying Cat O’Donnell might be up for a Nobel Prize. But she wouldn’t have a career if it weren’t for Haven. The whole idea of individual-specific stem cell regeneration... It seems obvious now, but that was a revolutionary idea.”
The name O’Donnell touched Lyra like the electric zap of the Extraordinary Kissable Graph: one of the machines she’d loved the best at Haven, which read her heartbeats and then drew them, vividly, in climbing green lines and vivid peaks that recalled the mountains she’d seen only on TV.
“You... you know Dr. O’Donnell?” she asked.
“I mean, not personally.” Sebastian gave her a look she didn’t know how to decipher. “I just know her becauseof what she’s doing at CASECS. I heard she used to work with Dr. Saperstein at Haven,” he added, almost as an afterthought. “That’s why he’s suing her. I guess he thinks she stole some of his research. Meanwhile O’Donnell won’t say a word about it. Still, pictures never lie.”
He pulled out his cell phone and made adjustments to it, tapping and swiping the screen. Then he spun it across the table to her and she lost her breath.
There, in miniature, was Dr. O’Donnell, stepping off one of the trash ferries that used to travel back and forth to Haven. She was wearing regular clothing, and her head was angled toward Dr. Saperstein, who was next to her, but Lyra would have known her just from the geometry of her ear where it joined her jaw, by the color of her hair, by the way her mouth flattened when she thought.
Dr. O’Donnell had given them names from the stars, and so she had given them a whole universe.
And in a single instant, Lyra realized how wrong she had been, how stupid.
Dr. Saperstein wasn’t God.
Dr. O’Donnell was.
Turn the page to continue reading Lyra’s story. Click here to read Chapter 14 of Gemma’s story.
FIFTEEN
LYRA DIDN’T LIKE TO STEAL from Sebastian. He was nice. He had helped them. He had resurrected Dr. O’Donnell, and shown them where CASECS was, only a short distance away in a place called Allentown.
But she was beginning to understand that those things didn’t matter. Whether he was nice or not, he had a phone that she wanted, and so she took it when he wasn’t paying attention.
Richard Haven had a whole building. He had his name above beautiful glass doors. And he was not nice.
Being nice didn’t matter. Only taking did, the way animals took.
They wouldn’t get far, Lyra knew, before Sebastian realized that Lyra had stolen his phone.
